IN THE PARISH OF THE POOR
Writings from Haiti
By Jean-Bertrand Aristide, translated and edited by Amy Wilentz
Orbis Books, 112 pp., $10.95 (paper)

1.

Late on a breezy afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
the elected president of the Republic of Haiti, descended from his limousine
on Capitol Hill and, accompanied by his entourage of Haitian aides and
American lawyers, made his way slowly into the Capitol to meeting room
S-116, where a group of senators and staff assistants awaited him. They
were from the foreign relations committee and they were there to discuss
strategy.

It was October 20, ten days before President Aristide
had been scheduled to return to the National Palace in Port-au-Prince
and reassume the office from which the Haitian military had expelled him
more than two years before. But the agreement—the so-called Governors
Island Accord, signed in New York on July 3—was unraveling: nine
days earlier, on October 11, the troopship USS Harlan County, carrying
more than 200 American "combat engineers and technical advisers" who were
to train and "professionalize" the Haitian military, had been greeted
at Port-au-Prince harbor by scores of angry civilians shouting nationalist
slogans and brandishing automatic weapons. After a day of limbo, during
which the Haitian army made no move to restore order, the Clinton administration
recalled the ship from Haitian waters.[1]

Two days later, on October 13, the United Nations Security
Council voted to reimpose sanctions on the de facto military regime in
Port-au-Prince and, two days after that, President Clinton sent a half
dozen American warships to enforce what was, in effect, a blockade on
Haiti. By Wednesday afternoon, even as President Aristide sat in the meeting
room on the first floor of the Capitol, sipping coffee and urging the
senators to "support his return to Haiti"[2]
by keeping up the pressure on the officers in Port-au-Prince, an iron
band of foreign warships had encircled his tiny country and begun, inexorably,
to squeeze.

That October 20, even
as President Aristide was discussing Haiti with the senators in room S-116,
three floors up, in room S-407, another group of senators was discussing
Aristide. Or rather, they were listening as one Brian Latell, a thirty-year
veteran of the CIA and the agency's national intelligence officer for Latin
America, presented the intelligence community's "psychological profile"
of the forty-year-old Haitian president. Though the briefing was held under
conditions meant to ensure the utmost secrecy—room S-407 is one of
the Capitol's "secure rooms," designed with elaborate "counter-measures"
to prevent eavesdropping—a number of its participants made sure that,
within twenty-four hours, much of what the intelligence analyst had said
had become front-page news.

Senator Jesse Helms, who had requested the briefing from
the Senate floor earlier on Wednesday—during a speech in which, among
other things, he had denounced President Aristide as a "psychopath"—took
to the floor again on Thursday and, having offered assurances that the
technical sophistication of room S-407 ensured that "nobody can bug it;
nobody outside the room can know what was said," proceeded to alert his
fellow senators and the world at large that "the CIA yesterday confirmed
every jot and tittle of what I said…about Aristide."

The CIA confirmed the perilous situation involving
Aristide and the necklacing that Mr. Aristide has practiced, but which
he denied yesterday afternoon [in the meeting in S-116, which Helms mocked
as a "love-in"]….

Aristide is a killer. He is a demonstrable killer.
And I do not want the life of one soldier or sailor from the United States
of America to die in the interest of that man.

"He is a psychopath." The news media say, "Good
God; did Helms say that?" You bet Helms said it, and so did the CIA….

This cruel man has made fiery speeches exhorting
his followers to use the necklace method, as it is called, to destroy
his political enemies in agony.

This is not hearsay; it is a demonstrable fact.
The President of the United States has known it, and the Secretary of
State of the United States has known it. But not until yesterday, when
the Senator from North Carolina began talking about this and we got the
CIA up on the fourth floor of the Capitol, was it confirmed.[3]

By Friday bits and pieces of the "secret" briefing had
been strewn liberally throughout the news media. Wolf Blitzer of Cable
News Network, quoting unspecified "sources," reported that "the CIA cited
evidence…that Aristide suffers from severe mood swings and depression
that have required him to take such medication as Lithium and Haldol."
Later that day, Judy Woodruff announced that "CNN has learned" that the
CIA's "psychological profile strongly suggest[ed] that Jean-Bertrand Aristide
may be mentally disturbed."

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that
Latell had described "Aristide's 1980 visit to a psychiatric hospital
in Canada." Two days later, the Post expanded that to "hospital
and pharmaceutical records suggesting that Aristide had been treated for
manic depression…." A columnist in the Post would later inform
readers that Aristide "has used thirteen kinds of medication." Also prominent
in the CIA's assessment, according to the Post, were "allegations
that while serving as a priest in Haiti, Aristide organized a ruthless
gang of supporters who routinely used violence." And, Latell predicted,
according to one account, that if Aristide is restored to power, "he will
rule with violence."[4]

By the weekend, prominent officials from the Bush administration
were making their views known. Richard Cheney, the former secretary of
defense, declared to a television interviewer that "there are very serious
questions about [Aristide's] mental stability, about his conduct in office,…"
and went on to assure viewers the following week that "there's little
doubt about the validity of what the CIA produced." General Brent Scowcroft,
President Bush's national security adviser, told one interviewer that
the "real important points about [Aristide] are that his behavior can
be erratic," while, to another, he echoed Senator Helms in judging Aristide
to be "probably a certifiable psychopath."[5]

The appearances of the Bush officials were no accident,
for one thing virtually all of the charges had in common was that they had
been made public two years before, in the days and weeks after Aristide
had been overthrown on September 30, 1991. Many of them were at least partly
based on information systematically provided by the same Haitian officers
who had overthrown him. That Aristide suffered from depression had been
common knowledge in Haiti for years, but only after the coup, when Haitian
officers reportedly presented to American diplomats several bottles of prescription
drugs that they claimed to have found in the president's bedroom, did Aristide's
psychological "condition" become a matter of political controversy.[6]

Now, two years after the coup d'état, the images
of "Aristide the psychopath" and "Aristide the killer" had been conjured
up once again. Clinton administration officials, confronted with this
attack on the central figure in their policy toward Haiti, responded rather
sheepishly. "In our dealings with President Aristide," said a White House
spokeswoman, "he has been rational and responsible. He…has lived
up to the commitments that he has made…and so it is our judgment,
based on our experience with him, that he is fully qualified to serve
as the President of Haiti." President Clinton himself, chatting with reporters
after his morning jog, told them that his opinion that Aristide was fit
to lead Haiti had been bolstered by "everyone else in the Administration
in working with him."[7]

It fell somewhat short of a ringing endorsement, for
conspicuously absent from these defenses was any disavowal of charges
the CIA analyst had made. Indeed, on the day after the briefing, Clinton's
director of central intelligence, R. James Woolsey, had told members of
the House and Senate intelligence committees that he "fully supported
what Latell had said."[8]
It was left to Aristide himself to dispute Latell's account. This he did
in a series of interviews in which he denied, among other things, that
he had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, that he had taken the drugs
named, or that he had even been in Canada in 1980. Finally, he attempted,
in his limited English, to make light of the CIA assessment:

I smile. I could even laugh because it's all
that garbage. I respect those who say that, but I reject what they say
because it's garbage. Secondly, they said worst about Martin Luther King.
Thirdly, as a psychologist, I know what about character assassination.
As a psychologist I know what about psychological war. Fourth, people
could read my books, particularly three of them to find out what they
want to know. I mean, myself.[9]

But even if Americans took the time to read his books
they would find no answers. His autobiography, written after the first
surge of accusations in 1991, said nothing about depression or treatment,
nothing about the specific claims that he had incited violence—nothing
to dispute what the CIA had said. To the reader, Aristide offered only
his own vision—as he had to the Haitians who had followed him and
worshiped him, and who, as they wait behind the American blockade, follow
him still. For Haitians believed, even if Americans didn't, that all of
it—not only the election triumph, but the deep depressions and the
blood-curdling calls to arms—all of it formed part of one narrative,
irreducible and perfect: the gospel of the Leader.

2.

The true birth of Aristide's political career—his
metamorphosis from priest to politician—had been consecrated in blood,
in the great eruption of violence and terror on September 11, 1988, that
came to be known as the massacre at St. Jean Bosco. Aristide refers to
this event as "the Calvary of St. Jean Bosco," although he managed, once
again, to escape death. The priest was spirited away from his burning
church, which he had made a center of dissent against the brutal rule
of those who had inherited power from Duvalier. Hidden and isolated by
his order, he fell into a paralyzing depression—a not altogether
inappropriate response, it should be said, to seeing scores of his helpless
parishioners hacked apart with machetes before his eyes.

That Aristide was subject to depression, that he sometimes
suffered from "nervous crises" or "nervous prostrations," had by then
become common knowledge among his followers. It did not lessen their devotion;
on the contrary. Not only had eccentric and erratic behavior been closer
to the rule than the exception among Haiti's leaders (with the withering
rages and raspy-voiced harangues of Papa Doc only the most recent and
vivid example), but a central part of Father Aristide's appeal was his
very frailty: he was a tiny man, had little more flesh than his emaciated
followers. And yet, there he stood on the pulpit, his arms extended like
Christ himself, his voice—great and unflagging, as if powered by
an unseen presence—echoing defiance to every corner of the nave.
His very weakness made him one with his parishioners; his strength, which
seemed an otherworldly gift, convinced them that they too could be strong.

After the president was overthrown in September 1991,
seven months after he had taken office, a young woman who numbered herself
among his followers told me that Aristide "was like our child, our infant.
And we took care of that infant and we bathed and fed him and cherished
him. And now, now the soldiers have taken our baby away from us." For
Haitians, his depressions evince not only his frailty but the reality
of his inspiration. In her portrait of Aristide, published in 1989, Amy
Wilentz quotes this account of one of his "crises," attributed to an unnamed
Haitian journalist who interviewed the priest after "some commotion at
the church, an assassination attempt or something':

He stops eating…ends up looking like a
skeleton. He's lying in his bed in his little room, looking like he's
already dead,…and all these church people are running around, taking
care of him. They fan him, they try to convince him to take aspirin and
Valium, they put cold compresses on his fevered brow…and they whisper
warm words of comfort to him. Half of it is drama, but half of it or more
is real. His cheeks sink in, and you can see his ribs against his shirt.
And then the next day he's giving a sermon. A brilliant sermon. The breakdown
makes his people love him more…. His frailty isn't perceived as a
weakness…. In a way, these crises are perceived as a kind of solidarity
with the poor. He's starving himself, and they're starving….

Not only solidarity, however: the people understand that
the Prophet bears great weight upon his shoulders, that he suffers the
contempt not only of the regime but of his own bishops, and that he suffers
it for them:

He's a priest working for a church that basically
hates him. He's living inside a family that won't tolerate him. They're
always trying to get rid of him. He's like an abused child, and he exhibits
the kinds of psychological reactions those children have. It's not an
easy life, and it could make a man have breakdowns. So he does.[10]

Now with his church
in a smoking ruin, his superiors wasted no time in trying once again "to
get rid of" Aristide. On the night of September 11, 1988, after he had escaped
the carnage at St. Jean Bosco, he was received by "the men of the Church,"
as he calls them: the papal "nuncio, magnificent in his cassock, wearing
a compassionate smile and assuring me of his full sympathy." As Aristide
knew, the nuncio had watched the dénouement of the drama from beyond
the church gates that afternoon. "At first, I swear, I hesitated to receive
his embrace. Finally, I thought that in the most tragic moments one ought
to respond with love, even if I thought him an accomplice." These are harsh
words; throughout his writings Aristide reserves his bitterest attacks for
his Church superiors. Of the nuncio he says that "neither he nor the bishops
had the courage to cry out when the wolves were devouring the sheep before
their eyes. The opposite of courage is called cowardice."

The bishops, not to speak of the nuncio, did not see
things this way. To them, Aristide, by relentlessly attacking a murderous
and reckless regime, had placed himself and his defenseless parishioners
far out on a limb, and was attempting to pull the entire Church out there
with him. Why was he shocked when the regime sawed the limb off? Aristide
saw the churchmen as cowardly, corrupted by their timidity and greed;
they saw him as arrogant, reckless, and, most maddeningly perhaps, so
overwhelmingly self-righteous that he could shield his own ambitions with
a literal interpretation of the Gospel whose implications they could not
abide.

The day after "that bloody Sunday," the Salesian superior
arrived in Port-au-Prince and met with the traumatized priest. "Listen,"
Aristide quotes him as saying, "we have asked you often enough these past
three years not to get mixed up in politics, and to stick to your mission
as a priest. Now you see the result: our church burned, our house ransacked.
Have you considered how much physical damage you have brought on our community?"

At this Aristide explodes:

Thirteen people had died in the fire or from
gunshots, and that was his first thought! However much love I have for
my neighbor, I received this language, coming from a Christian whose mission
was to be more Christian than others, as a slap in the face. For want
of love, I managed to keep my composure.

The superior proposed, once again, that Aristide leave
Haiti—for Canada, for Rome: "the same refrain." Aristide asked for
time to reflect; by his own account, his considerations were frankly political:

Once I had left, the enemies of the community
would surely proceed to make it pay dearly for the spirit of resistance
within it. But worse, they would say: "Look, you others, some are dead,
others are wounded or in flight, you are suffering, you are persecuted—and
the man who got you so worked up is taking it easy outside the country.
He has abandoned you!"

He was isolated now,
invisible to his followers except for one brief and silent public appearance.
But outside, the events he set in motion had their consequences. On September
17, 1988, a group of noncommissioned officers and soldiers in the presidential
guard—the ti soldats, or "little soldiers," most of them uneducated
young peasants—banded together. Disgusted by the attack on the church,
and by the arrogance of the killers—several of whom brazenly appeared
in television interviews the night of the massacre offering macabre "post-game"
accounts of how they did it and vowing to "get" Aristide "next time"—the
ti soldats launched a half-organized and rather comic coup d'état.
They arrested General Namphy, placed him and his family in an armored car,
and sent them to the airport, whence they were flown on to Santo Domingo
(where they would occupy the same rooms that President Leslie Manigat had
taken when Namphy overthrew him scarcely two and a half months before).

At the Palace, meantime, the ti soldats deliberated.
Power was floating in the air, ready to be seized. The presidency was
theirs to bestow. They offered it to one of their number, a young sergeant
who enjoyed the considerable distinction of having attended high school.
The young man, taken aback, burst into tears. They deliberated further.
Finally, they were interrupted by the arrival of General Prosper Avril,
a celebrated figure who had been a favorite of Papa Doc—"L'intelligent
Avril," the old man is reputed to have christened him—and later
served as a close aide to his son. Avril was rich, worldly, well-traveled,
and a practiced Palace politician; soon, he was helpfully agreeing to
wield power with the young sergeant.

But a process had begun that even General Avril proved
powerless to stop. During the days and weeks after the coup, as the people
celebrated the fall of Namphy—a celebration which included more than
one exercise in "popular justice," including the killing and immolation
of several of the St. Jean Bosco killers before the ruins of the church—the
command structure of the Armed Forces of Haiti began to splinter and collapse.
Triumphant young soldiers arrested their hated commanders and crowds gathered
before the Quartier General to laugh and cheer as the ti soldats
deposited their captives—many of them handcuffed, some stripped to
their underwear—like so many sacks of dirty laundry.

Among the powerful and the rich, meanwhile, fear had
begun to spread. The army was fragmenting! If at any time since the fall
of Duvalier Haiti had come close to Father Aristide's cherished "unarmed
revolution," surely it was now.

Father Aristide, in seclusion, noticed a change in
attitude. Before the coup, he writes, his superiors "desired my departure
so strongly that I had no illusions. With the coup d'état, the course
changed 180 degrees. They asked me to remain…"

I was an embarrassment: get out! You can protect
us from a new situation: stay here! Quite aware of popular reaction, the
bishops, having calculated very well, preferred that I should remain.

But Aristide was not so easily used. Two weeks after
the coup, he came out of seclusion to make a famous speech over Radio
Soleil. He began by addressing the members of his order in a voice laced
with sarcasm:

The messages that usually come from Rome ask
for my departure.

The most recent one, however, has accorded me
the right to remain here among you.

For how long?

A mystery.

He then moved on to St. Jean Bosco, saluting its victims,
and drawing the connection—in case anyone had missed it—between
the massacre and the nascent revolution:

Because Jesus loved the poor, he sacrificed
his life for them.

Because the victims of the massacre at St. Jean
Bosco were bathed in love, they fell like Jesus for the deliverance of
our nation.

But now comes the main section of the speech, an open
appeal to the ti soldats:

At Mass on Good Friday of last year, I washed
the feet of a soldier to remind us that the role of a military man is
to bow down before the people, to wash the feet of the people, and not
to wash his own feet in the blood of the people.

But today, I am more disposed to kiss the feet
of all the valiant and patriotic soldiers who have chosen to remain in
the people's camp, who have chosen to continue the clean-up operation
until we overthrow the table of privilege and corruption where the elite
are feasting.

The time is now, the chance to "overthrow the table"
was not to be missed; for already the forces of reaction were gathering:

The US government, along with its lackeys among
the Haitian elite, has already begun to conspire to infiltrate Macoutes
into the Army, to buy off soldiers, to sow corruption….

The Army's rank-and-file and the Haitian people
must tie themselves together in a great and solid chain….

A solid organization among the Palace guards,
the guards of the Dessalines Barracks, the guards of the General Headquarters,
and the guards of the Leopard Unit must grow like the horns of an angry
bull…

If the Duvalierist officers and the two or three
Macoutes who have been forcibly removed and all the others who ought to
be removed—if they are not brought before the people's court, we
may well say that we have been April Fools.[11]

It was an open call to rebellion. But Aristide's timing
proved faulty. Already General Avril had begun to rein in his little soldiers;
soon he would stage an adroitly managed counter-coup and throw most of
the more militant ones in jail.

Aristide had delivered a full-throated call to arms,
one that the officers and the elite have not forgotten. Using all his
oratorical powers, he had put himself forward as leader of the Jacobins.
Unfortunately for him, Thermidor had already arrived.

3.

Two weeks before Christmas 1988, after a period of controversy
and public demonstrations—the largest of which succeeded in paralyzing
the capital, preventing Aristide from following the Salesians' directive
that he leave the country—the order came down from Rome: for his
"lack of sincerity and of a religious and priestly consciousness," for
his "profanation of the liturgy," his "destabilization of the community
of the faithful," his "incitement to hatred and violence and glorifying
of class struggle"—for all these reasons and more, the Salesians
had cast him out.[12]

It was hardly a surprise. Several weeks before, he had
delivered a powerful radio message in which he had denounced not only
General Avril but the Papal nuncio and the bulk of the Haitian hierarchy:

A Creole word rich in connotations, Lavalas evokes
not only "flood," as it is usually translated, but its near cognate, "avalanche";
for poor Haitians the word evokes the image of the sweeping rains that
spawn the torrents that course through the enormous slums, flooding the
tin-and-scrapwood hovels and sweeping away the garbage and the filth that
clog the pathways. To the images of "uprooting," of "pulling up the manioc,"
of "the clean-up operation"—to all these homely tropes of Haiti's
popular movement Aristide now added Lavalas, an image that transformed
the poor millions of Haiti into a surging wave that could not be forestalled,
a revolution that was unstoppable and inevitable:

Let the flood descend, the flood of

Poor peasants and poor soldiers, the flood of
the poor jobless multitudes…

But the flood did not descend, not right away, and Aristide,
expelled from his order, was left to enter the wilderness. During the
late summer of 1989 I visited him at Lafanmi Selavi, his home for street
children in a pleasant upper-class neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, watched
as he conducted a Spanish class—repeating the verb tenses, writing
them on the black-board, encouraging with infinite patience the members
of the class, who ranged from seven-year-old foundlings, their heads shaved
to prevent lice, to sixty-year-old retirees—and then looked on as
he quietly discussed political strategy with a group of young radio reporters.

When we spoke, however, I was startled by his bitterness.
He railed against the Haitian Church; denounced the bishops by name; spoke
angrily of Obando y Bravo, the conservative archbishop of Managua. In
answer to my question about the depredations of General Avril—who,
after almost a year atop his military regime, showed no signs of yielding
power—Aristide showed a defiant and angry faith. "It is good,"
he said, "it is good that this man is cruel and greedy and brutal,
for the more the mask falls, the more this Macoute regime lets show its
evil face, the sooner the people will rise up and sweep it away."[13]

By then, Avril had narrowly
survived one coup and was struggling to forestall a second by spreading
broadly among his officers the fruits of corruption that could still be
extracted from the country's handful of state-owned enterprises. He struggled
also to induce the Americans to restore their aid and, by promising elections
and making use of a considerable ability to project (at least to American
officials) an aura of "competence" and "pragmatism," he managed to attract
a trickle of money. But he could find no way out of the political impasse.
When the unions and mass organizations called strikes that fall, General
Avril cracked down, displaying the battered faces of several popular young
leaders on national television. In January 1990, when competition among
various of his officers had grown intense and murderous, he cracked down
again, and made the mistake of attacking not only the popular leaders but
several of les candidats, the leaders of the more traditional political
parties, some of whom had made use of their years of exile to build strong
contacts abroad.

In the face of international protests, the general backed
down. By March 1990 he was finished, swept from power by a campaign of
protests that, like those of the summer of 1987, were a product of collaboration
between the popular leaders and les candidats. The final push was
applied by the new American envoy, an unusually able diplomat named Alvin
Adams, Jr.,[14] who
visited the general's villa in the hills above the capital for a pre-dawn
heart-to-heart and persuaded Avril, with the help of—so the legend
has it—the example of Richard Nixon during Watergate, that the time
had come for the general to move on.

During those final days, leaders on the far left had
openly called for Aristide's appointment as "provisional president." For
his part, Aristide called for an "anti-Macoute civilian government." In
March 1990, power passed to a rather jerry-built civilian regime in which
Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, a little-known Supreme Court judge with mildly
Duvalierist connections, presided as provisional president, advised by
a quasi-legislative "Council of State" made up of leaders from the unions,
the private sector, and other parts of "civil society." Though Trouillot
promised early elections, Father Aristide was adamant: "Justice against
the Macoute criminals must happen before elections," he said. The provisional
government must "take up its responsibilities,…[for] the authorities
have sufficient resources in hand to make judicial proceedings." Three
months after the provisional regime had come to power, when soldiers launched
a murderous attack on a meeting of the Council of State in which two people
were killed, Aristide offered some public advice to the American ambassador,
among others, advising him to.

speak of elections after justice, please. Let's
begin together by disarming the Macoutes. When you speak to us of elections
while there is a question of justice, keep in mind that you are implicated,
keep in mind that you deserve to be treated as a criminal when right in
front of you these armed bandits are spitting death.

This was the paradox that has haunted Haiti's politics
since the fall of Duvalier: how to manage a peaceful transition of power.
If "the structures of corruption" remained firmly in place, as Aristide
believed, how was it possible to hold a truly free election? And yet,
if not by elections, how could those "structures" be removed?

Aristide's answer, in 1990 as in 1985, was definitive:
only "a popular mobilization against the criminal Macoutes" could cleanse
the country of Duvalierist corruption. Haitians still cried out, he said,
for "a revolution that will change Haiti for once and for all," as he
had put it the summer before. An election, even a fair one, would inevitably
leave the old order firmly in place.

Like so many of his prophesies, this one would be fully
realized. Indeed, he would prove it right himself, the following fall
and winter, when the revolutionary stepped forward before the nation and
revealed himself to be a democrat after all.

4.

In announcing he would enter as a candidate in the "official"
electoral contest, as he finally did on October 18, 1990, less than two
months before the vote, Jean-Bertrand Aristide contradicted much of what
he had said and stood for during his five-year public life. If his followers
couldn't have cared less about this—they were wildly enthusiastic,
for they saw their hero at long last moving to take the power he deserved—then
Father Aristide certainly did: his ambivalence about the decision lends
an air of defensiveness and self-justification to his account that makes
it (together with the story of his decision to go ahead with the mass
that became the St. Jean Bosco massacre) much the most interesting passage
of his autobiography.

"We"—the popular movement—"were in danger of
falling into a trap," Aristide writes:

The executive, no doubt egged on by imperialism,
was trying to keep the people at a distance from the electoral scene.
By moving toward a boycott or toward more radical measures, we would cede
the ground to others, to some Manigat who would be more easily elected
and more solidly entrenched in power.

Of course, this had always been the obvious contradiction
inherent in the boycott strategy: if the popular movement refused to take
part and the elections went ahead, anyway the result would have excluded
that movement. What was different now, and what Aristide acknowledges
in several particularly tortuous passages, was the foreign sponsorship
of the elections:

The fact was that international opinion demanded
these elections, and in any event Ertha [Pascal-Trouillot] was not Namphy.
Letting the Macoutes roam around and be active was not necessarily putting
them in the saddle, but it put pressure on the people to abstain from
voting and to allow the bourgeoisie alone to choose among acceptable candidates.

In other words, the provisional government had not moved
to arrest "the armed bandits spitting death" and render "justice" to them,
because, according to Aristide, it hoped the groups and parties on the
left would boycott the vote if the killers were allowed to run free. And
yet, weeks before Aristide declared his candidacy, many of these groups
had already announced that they would take part; indeed, though he contends
(in only one of the contradictions in his account) that "the multiplication
of opposition parties and candidates left scarcely any chance for the
left," barely two weeks before Aristide's announcement, the National Front
for Change and Democracy, or FNCD, an umbrella group of the left, had
put forward as its candidate for president the school-teacher and intellectual
Victor Benoí®t—a man who, it is true, commanded nowhere near
the popularity of Aristide but who, given the nationwide organizations
grouped under the FNCD, might well have won. Had Aristide agreed to campaign
for him, he probably could not have lost. In the event, Aristide displaced
him when he decided to run under the FNCD's banner.

Why did he run? Why,
after denouncing, as recently as June, the "presidentialism, this incurable
sickness" of Haitian politicians; after declaring, as recently as September
that "American imperialism" would make impossible fair elections under "the
werewolf," President Pascal-Trouillot—why, after all this, did he decide
in October to throw his hat into the ring?

One answer is that he realized the elections would be
observed by representatives from the United Nations and the Organization
of American States—an "interference" in the country's affairs that
had elicited vivid denunciations of "imperialism" from Haitian politicians:

In October, I had had a presentiment of the
importance of international opinion. Hundreds of observers, whose probity
could not be called into question, would be present. This time, the person
elected could boast of a legitimacy almost beyond discussion. Alas for
those who were absent!

Without the hundreds of foreign observers, and the active
involvement of the United States, Canada, France, and Venezuela that made
those observers possible, Aristide could not have won an election in Haiti;
for though his popular following was overwhelming, the traditional Haitian
political class would never have let him win—they would have blocked
him, either by scuttling the vote, as in 1987, or by ballot tampering
or, most likely, by somehow preventing him running in the first place.
"In Haiti," as a Haitian diplomat and former Duvalier minister had told
me, "the power in place always has a say in who will take power." But
not this time; it is only one of the ironies of Aristide's career that
his decision to run, and his spectacular victory, were made possible by
the very "imperialism" he had denounced so eloquently for so many years.

What is most interesting about Aristide's account is
the difficulty he had, and clearly still has, in explaining his own motives.
This reluctance bespeaks an ambivalence about official power and the apparatus
of politics that goes with it, an ambivalence that he brought with him—disastrously,
as it turned out—when he was elected to the highest office. He understands
the demand for power as a direct contradiction of the purity of his motives.
His expulsion by the Salesian order, he says, "had not changed my Christian
conscience, blunted my fidelity to the dispossessed…"

Some people expected that I would join a political
party…or, better still, that I would start my own. That would only
have given credibility to the accusation uttered here and there about
my immoderate taste for power, a power that, according to others, I wanted
to acquire at any price.

These "others" assume this of him because it is almost
always true of any Haitian with the least shred of popularity, whatever
the source. Politics drench Haitian society, as Leslie Manigat, a much
better political scientist than he was a president, once explained.

Everything is political and may become involved
in the struggle for power. All efforts to keep certain sectors of public
life out of politics have failed. Thus, perhaps nowhere else in the world
are physicians and lawyers more engaged in active politics. The reputation
earned by an engineer in his special field is regarded as a political
trump…. Politics extends its tentacles even into private life. Such
is the encroachment of politics on all aspects of life that if a man does
not go into politics, politics itself comes to him….[15]

The elite and the army took political ambition for granted;
what they could not abide was Aristide's professions of disinterestedness,
for they regarded this as the rankest hypocrisy, and it made them fear
him as unpredictable and reckless.

Father Aristide is certainly
a much more complicated man than portrayed in his enemies' caricatures of
him. His dark view of the reality of Haitian politics, of the sectarianism
and unfettered ambition that have poisoned the country's leaders for nearly
two centuries, is difficult to contest; and if his own version of his decisions
reveals a grave conflict between what he knew about the corruptions of power
and what in the end he was willing to do to get it, it is because there
is a conflict. "Presidentialism is a sickness that 'political' doctors
can easily find in Haiti," he writes:

The diagnosis is easy, but the remedy is less
sure. Our history is full of that epidemic, the principal symptom of which
is a ravenous desire on the part of the patient.

The presidency of Haiti always means power,
honor, and money, precisely the reverse of what we were trying to achieve:
to be of service to others, and especially to those who are most destitute.

In the end, he says he has no choice. He is, after all,
merely the instrument of the people, their servant:

"Titid ak pèp la se marasa" ["Titid
and the people are married"]. If I were to refuse, they would regard it
as a betrayal, as they would have done had I obeyed the orders for my
exile in 1987 and 1988, or deferred the Mass at St. Jean Bosco, however
gruesome it turned out to be. My candidacy was part of their reflexive
self-defense…. [my emphasis]

As he says in a discussion with a fellow priest, "We
had served the people together: would we not be betraying them by letting
them climb the last steps toward demoocracy alone? Was political responsibility
the extension of the prophetic role of our communities?"—a comment
that offers a clue to the depth of his disagreement with the organized
Church, from the Pope on down.

Unfortunately Haiti's politics and its machinery of government
had nothing whatever to do with "service to others" or helping "those
who are most destitute." Despite the coups d'état and revolutions
and the entire colorful epic of political struggle that is the country's
history, the underlying reality of Haiti has remained remarkably constant
for nearly two centuries: the machinery of power, no matter who controls
it, exists to funnel the resources of the country from the many to the
few—and it is the pastime of those few to fight over who will control
the funnel. Though he could not admit it even to himself, in entering
the race for president Aristide had declared his intention to join the
ranks of those fighting for that funnel; but as the traditional players
well knew, he had in mind, once he had won it, to do something very different
with it.

5.

On October 18, 1990, Aristide submitted himself to "the
will of the people," as he put it, and his entry into the race brought
an enormous surge in voter registration. Around the country he drew huge
crowds, and though the "Macoute sector" spoke darkly of apocalyptic violence,
only one serious incident marred the campaign (a grenade attack after
an Aristide rally in Petionville that killed five people). The presence
of the hundreds of international observers and the determination of the
principal embassies in Port-au-Prince helped to insure that the massacre
of 1987 was not repeated. So did the work of a Haitian army officer charged
with arranging security for the vote, a rather quiet, almost academic-seeming,
colonel from a well-connected family named Raoul Cédras. Perhaps
as important as any of these factors was a widespread disbelief among
the Haitian elite and the officer corps of the Haitian army that the United
States would ever let someone like Aristide actually take power.

But times had changed. Events in Moscow that summer had
made Castro a much less threatening figure for the makers of American
policy. Stability was gradually supplanting anticommunism as the central
American concern in the Caribbean. And so, on December 16, in an almost
carnival atmosphere of jubilation, Haitians cast their ballots in an election
that, apart from considerable problems in getting ballots to the polling
places, went forward without challenge or incident. The following morning,
reporters listening to a briefing by a United Nations official began,
one by one, to cock their heads toward the window, from which an indescribable
humming, an emanation of white noise not unlike that of the seacoast heard
from a distance, had gradually become audible. News of the preliminary
vote count had come over the radio. What we heard was the sound of hundreds
of thousands of Haitians screaming all at once in their joy. They poured
into the streets, dancing, singing, swigging rum; every car horn in Port-au-Prince,
it seemed, was honking at once. The celebration went on all day and late
into the night.

Aristide had won 67.5 percent of the vote; his closest
challenger was Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official with good contacts
at the US embassy, with just over 14 percent. The figures were a shock—to
the embassy, where many diplomats expected no candidate would gain a majority
in the first round; to the well-to-do; and to the officer corps. But the
hopes of both the officers and many among the elite were dashed when the
American ambassador and the assistant secretary of state offered statements
almost immediately recognizing the legitimacy of Aristide's victory.

The reaction was not long in coming. On January 2, Franí§ois-Wolff
Ligondé, the archbishop of Port-au-Prince and Father Aristide's old
antagonist, stood in the Cathedral and delivered an extraordinary sermon
in which he declared that "fear is sending a chill down the spines of
many fathers and mothers." Denouncing "opportunists ready to swallow up
everything" the archbishop brandished the specter of a coming "authoritarian
political regime." "Is socialist Bolshevism going to triumph?" he asked
gravely, gazing out at his congregation, which included the officers in
their ribbons and most of the other powerful of the country. "Is the country
heading toward a new dictatorship?"

6.

One week later, on the evening of January 6, 1991, Haitians
were awakened by the sound of explosions and automatic weapons fire coming
from the palace. Shortly before one o'clock in the morning, they heard
over their radios the quavering voice of President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot
resigning her office, and then, a few moments later, the raspy, somewhat
mocking voice of Dr. Roger Lafontant, master of repression and torture,
proudly self-professed Macoute, announcing that he had assumed power as
"provisional president" in order to rescue Haitians from the results of
elections he called a "masquerade" and a "scathing insult."

Word spread instantly through the slums of Port-au-Prince
as Haitians went door-to-door, rousing their neighbors. Even as Lafontant
busied himself within the Palace, telephoning army officers and issuing
orders, the streets of the capital began to fill with angry people. They
knew Lafontant well: as a staunch supporter of Franí§ois Duvalier,
as his son's interior minister in 1973 and again from 1982 to 1985. Round-faced,
big-bellied, bald-headed, with a hearty laugh and a mocking wit, the fifty-five-year-old
gynecologist had long been a Doppelgänger, a kind of "dark
twin" to Aristide; for it had been Lafontant who had first sent the young
priest from the country in 1982; Lafontant who had given the country a
vivid image of the most bloodthirsty "Macoutism" (which included the habit
of dropping into "interrogation" sessions to watch and cheer on the torturers),[16]
Lafontant whom the priest could point to, after the doctor's return from
exile in July 1990, as the justification for his entering the election.
The "danger was clear, already identified," he writes, "it even had a
name: Lafontant."

Now Lafontant had seized
power; but while he made his telephone calls from the Palace, and the army
officers mostly sat on their hands and waited, the people took to the streets.
By dawn, when the American ambassador had finally succeeded in reaching
the army commander by telephone and was beseeching him to "uphold the constitutional
order," smoke was rising over the capital from burning barricades; by nine
o'clock, when the officers finally led an assault on the Palace, their soldiers
had to make their way through an ocean of tens of thousands of angry Haitians,
who were waving machetes and pikes and bellowing for Lafontant's head. When,
after a very noisy but mostly theatrical gun battle, the troops succeeded
in taking the Palace—the Macoute leader was discovered cowering in
an elevator—they had all they could do to prevent Lafontant's being
lynched on the spot.

Furious crowds went on a rampage. A local radio reporter,
making his way slowly through the neighborhoods that day, offered his
listeners this account of the ravaged city:

Barricades are spaced at 20-meter intervals,
some very high, others feeding strong fires. The population, in a terrified
state, refuses passage….

Before us Delmas [Road] is dark with people,
smoke, and barricades. Far away on the mountain to the right, the house
of the apostolic nuncio is burning.

On Nazon Street, an apocalyptic scene awaits
us. We count six burned corpses. The horror mounts. Eight dismembered
bodies lie in the street. Former partisans of Roger Lafontant did not
escape the fury of popular vindication. They were slaughtered with knives
and pikes. Some were eviscerated, others emasculated. Before our horrified
eyes a taxi driver, with passengers inside the car, drives over the bodies…[17]

Mobs stormed the Vatican embassy, seized the papal nuncio—who
happened to be a new man, not Father Aristide's old antagonist—and
forced him into the street, where they stripped and humiliated him and
beat his secretary. They sacked and burned the nunciature; burned the
building that housed the Haitian bishops' conference; sacked the house
of Pascal-Trouillot's interior minister; sacked and burned the residence
of Archbishop Ligondé. (The archbishop himself, who was thought to
have invited the coup attempt with his New Year's sermon, barely escaped
capture and managed to flee the country.) The mobs also burned the landmark
wooden Cathedral, one of the oldest in the Americas. Across the capital,
mobs set upon monuments of "Macoutism," including offices of a well-known
right-wing magazine and the house of at least one presidential candidate,
as well as stores and businesses that supposedly belonged to "Macoutes";
they proceeded to loot them, then burn them down. By the time it was over,
scores of people had been killed, many by the so-called Père Lebrun,
the practice—named for an image in a local tire advertisement—by
which a tire is placed around the victim's neck, filled with gasoline,
and then set afire. Estimates of the number of dead ranged from seventy
to one hundred.

Lavalas,
the Flood, had triumphed. In the general celebration, many Haitians, including
several of his close advisers, urged Father Aristide, who had barely escaped
capture by Lafontant's agents, not to wait for the inauguration on February
7; he should simply assume power. Having been elected, he would now be carried
to power on the shoulders of the people, swept into the Palace by a popular
revolution. Aristide broached the idea to at least one embassy and, faced
with a strong protest that he respect "the orderly transfer of power," he
discarded it. Now, two days after the coup attempt, he took to the radio
to try to calm his followers:

Brothers and sisters, a promise is a promise.
I had promised you that Mrs. Ertha Pascal-Trouillot would be back in her
office as the provisional president. I wish her good luck….

I note that you are at the same time happy and
sad, happy because Roger Lafontant and other terrorists like him are in
jail, and sad, because he and his accomplices are not in your hands. I
understand your desire to catch the powerful Macoutes today so that they
do not destroy you tomorrow. This is legitimate.

Be careful, however, to avoid the trap of provocation.
Beware of evil persons who are doing wrong, but accusing you. Watch for
them, capture them, block them, prevent them from creating disorder…

We, the elected president of the Republic of
Haiti, are protesting energetically against impunity and injustice. The
fires of the nuncio and the ancient Cathedral…and other painful scenes
offer a hideous show. People, the shrewd observer can recognize the explosion
of popular anger in the face of impunity for the terrorist….[18]

As he had told me almost five years before, "One must
know when to look at the acts of the people and judge them as a psychologist,
not as a priest." Not a political party or an organized group, Lavalas
was simply the people, and they formed his strength. They had saved his
life, his presidency. He could not denounce them, as some, including the
State Department spokesman in Washington, urged him to do. He had only,
he felt, to talk to them, to teach them, to implore them to be "vigilant
without revenge."

7.

Though it came before his inauguration, the attempted
coup of January 7 may have been the most important event of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide's presidency. It isolated the Macoutes politically and set before
senior officers a powerful demonstration of the new president's popular
strength. For though only a handful of military men had accompanied Lafontant
into the Palace, the officer corps (various accounts in the American press
notwithstanding) had not exactly "defended democracy": [19]
Lafontant had occupied the Palace for more than eleven hours unmolested
before the officers, prodded by foreign diplomats and by their dawning
realization that the people might well turn on them if they didn't
act, had moved against him.

On Inauguration Day, February 7, 1991, five years to
the day after the overthrow of Duvalier, Aristide capitalized on this
newfound political strength by including, in an eloquent speech, an order
to retire seven senior officers, including six generals. It was a brilliant
coup de théí¢tre, a symbol of defiant popular triumph.
But it was only the capstone. For days, the denizens of the bidonvilles—the
proud constituents of Lavalas—had been refurbishing their
slums, picking the garbage from the dirt pathways, painting their scrapwood
hovels. Never, it seemed, had the capital been so clean. On the walls,
in the windows, on the storefronts—everywhere was the face of Aristide.

In the days after the jubilant inaugural, the new president
performed one feat after another. He flung open the doors of Fort Dimanche,
the dreaded Duvalier prison, and let the people wander through to gaze
at the torture chambers where so many thousands had died. He invited the
poorest of the poor to come to the Palace, where on the vast green lawns
he served them a copious meal of rice and beans. Or rather, he had his
soldiers serve them—soldiers, serving the poor! It was unheard of
in the history of the country. And there, in the midst of it all, stood
the President of the Republic, speaking softly in the ear of a deformed
and crippled young beggar, whom he held tightly in his embrace.

For anyone who followed
events in Haiti, these scenes could not help but inspire happiness and wonder.
After five years, the popular movement had triumphed. And yet, it was not
quite so simple. Aristide had reached the Palace, but before him lay the
task that confronted every Haitian president: to attain power, somehow to
master the entrenched system that had dominated the country for two centuries.
This demanded a much more delicate political strategy. For though Aristide
had achieved what he called an "overwhelming mandate," this was rather misleading.
It was true that he had won two thirds of the vote; it was equally true
that the overwhelming majority of Haiti's rich and powerful numbered themselves
among the other third. The old order remained; no revolution had swept it
away. Now the new president had two choices: he could move to ignite such
a revolution, or he could try to accomplish his goals within the political
structure that had brought him to the Palace.

To his credit, he chose the second course, but he proved
singularly unfitted, by temperament and by experience, to follow it. For
the political structure he inherited consisted of a decrepit and barely
functioning judiciary; a plethora of political parties run by headstrong
and vain "leaders" for whom compromise was synonymous with surrender;
a deeply suspicious officer corps jealous of its prerogatives; and a small,
well-educated, and very rich elite who, when they gazed on the face of
their new president and his supporters, found it difficult to feel anything
but disgust and fear. To their collective memory of the horrors of Haitian
history—which extended back to the early Sixties, when Franí§ois
Duvalier's noiriste followers (also wildly enthusiastic and brutal,
also drawn from the slums of the capital) murdered their relatives and
sacked their businesses; back to their grandfathers' time, in 1883, when,
during Bloody Week, the great black nationalist President Louis-Félicité
Lysius Salomon loosed his poor black followers on the capital's business
district, which they sacked and burned, murdering anyone they found; back
to the 1850s, when the Emperor Faustin I, an illiterate and enormously
fat black soldier, had used his zinglins, his militia formed of
black peasants, to terrorize the elite—to this stock of images were
now added those of January 7, 1991, the pictures, televised again and
again, of the looting and the killing and the burning in the center of
Port-au-Prince, and the reluctance of the army—their protector,
after all, for wasn't it their money that flowed into the pockets of the
officers?—to do anything about it.[20]

It was this political class that Aristide had, if not
to win to his side, at least to calm. He had to do so not only for strategic
reasons—for though the army might be cowed for the present, they
retained the ultimate power to threaten his overthrow, which is how, after
all, the great majority of Haitian presidents have left office—he
had to do so for tactical reasons as well. For it fell to Aristide to
govern under a constitution that had as its presiding idea not the facilitating
of the programs of an extremely popular leader but the prevention of the
rise of another dictator. Next to Aristide himself, the 1987 constitution
was the popular movement's proudest achievement, and it is only one of
many ironies of his story that when he took office in February 1991, with
the great ambition of launching a "social revolution," it was the constitution
that stood squarely in his way.

The document envisioned,
contrary to almost two hundred years of Haitian history, a weak executive,
tied down by more checks and balances than the ropes that bound Gulliver.
The president would not even run his government day-to-day; this task would
fall to the prime minister, who would be chosen from the ranks of the majority
party of the National Assembly. The legislature in Haiti, very rarely more
than a rubber stamp (during this century anyway), would now be powerful,
in some matters dominant. Among other things, the legislators would approve
the commander of the army; and it would be extremely difficult for the president
to remove him before the end of his three-year term. Tampering within the
command structure, a favorite pastime of Duvalier, was out of the question;
the army had been thoroughly insulated from executive power.

The constitution, in other words, had little to do with
the reality of governing Haiti, though it said much about the recent history
of the country. (The attentive reader of its provisions could almost reconstruct
the tactics Duvalier had used, working backward from the articles designed
expressly to prevent their repetition.) To make the system function at
all would have required the talents of a master politician, a man skilled
at building and maintaining coalitions within the legislature, for example.
Aristide may have won two thirds of the vote but the party under whose
banner he had run had won only twenty-seven of eight-three seats in the
lower house, and only thirteen of twenty-seven in the Senate. In fact,
his "party," the FNCD, was not really a party at all but a loose coalition
of popular organizations, unions and quasi-parties that, in its structure,
or lack of it, had little to do with parliamentary government. Moreover,
Aristide did not consider the FNCD to be his party at all. There could
be no question, he writes, of "my being the candidate of a single party,
no matter how close it might be to my own ideas; I could not even represent
a group of parties." Parties were against everything he had stood for;
they represented everything he despised. He needed no party; after all,
he had Lavalas.

Lavalas represented something quite different
from the FNCD…. The latter was a collection of a variety of movements
and political parties and played the role of a stimulus or spur to action,
at the same time that it furnished the legal organization necessary to
sponsor my candidacy. Lavalas was much, much more: a river with
many sources, a flood that would sweep away all the dross, all the after-effects
of a shameful past.

It is the lever that will enable us, one day,
to stop and to eradicate corruption…

It is clear, from his autobiography but even more from
his actions while in office, that President Aristide envisioned not a
representative democracy but a "direct" one. "The democracy to be built,"
he says, "should be in the image of Lavalas: participatory, uncomplicated,
and in permanent motion." It is a powerful image but it has nothing whatever
to do with the constitution under which he was elected. Joining Lavalas,
he says, "is not like taking out membership in a political party, paying
one's dues. Instead, it means freely joining a movement that transforms
perpetual vassals and servants into free men and women." He is talking,
as he admits, about revolution: "The political mutation was accomplished
without armed force," he writes. "The social revolution remained to be
accomplished." But he seems utterly unaware of the contradiction in trying
to attain such a revolution—which would include "a redistribution
of wealth, freely discussed"—by the strictly limited means which
the election and the constitution had placed in his hands.

Aristide misses the contradiction, of course, because
for him it doesn't exist. When the obvious political course was to use
his cabinet appointments to form coalitions with compatible parties, he
chose to unveil a cabinet of "non-politicians," mostly little known associates,
ignoring (and out-raging) the party leaders. No matter: who were they,
after all, but les candidats whom he had so long despised? But
now the Parliament had power, provided by the constitution—for all
the greed and vanity of the politicians, they had won office in the same
election he had—and the two branches began immediately to squabble.
Appointing a prime minister of some prominence might have helped; instead,
Aristide chose René Préval, a longtime political associate who,
though a well-meaning and decent man, commanded little respect in the
legislature, for he was widely viewed as Aristide's puppet.

8.

Even so, the accomplishments of Aristide's government
were considerable, especially when they are set beside the generally disastrous
regimes that preceded and succeeded it. Aristide's ministers made a start
on "cleaning out" the bloated and deeply corrupt government bureaucracy,
in which thousands of Haitians receive "zombie checks," a favorite form
of graft whereby paychecks made out in the name of Haitians who are dead
are cashed by people with connections within the ministries. This policy,
however laudable, also added thousands of embittered civil servants to
the ranks of his enemies. He negotiated a deal with a consortium of aid
donors, including the United States, France, the World Bank, and the International
Monetary Fund, that would have brought several hundred million dollars
to Haiti—although, in exchange, he had to agree to the IMF terms,
which, after his years of denouncing the multilateral organizations as
agents of imperialism that "suck Haiti's blood," caused a good deal of
consternation and protest among his supporters.

Most important, he managed, by winning his victory over
the "Macoute sector" and by managing for a time to improve relations with
the Haitian army, greatly to reduce the nightly killing and mayhem that
during the preceding few years had become a regular feature of Haitian
life. His easing of l'insécurité, which allowed people,
especially poor people, to walk abroad at night without fear of attack,
deeply improved life for the great majority of Haitians.

By the summer of 1990, however, the strains in the system
were beginning to show. The struggle within the legislature had become
protracted and bitter—over the president's right to appoint Supreme
Court judges without approval; over his power to "cleanse" the bureaucracy;
over, in general, his freedom of action in what was meant to be a system
of highly constraining checks and balances. The congressmen wanted money
and jobs, and many of them had no more use for the constitution than Aristide
had; but they understood the powers it granted them and they reminded
him at every opportunity that the people whose name the president so regularly
invoked had elected them as well. In many cases he might have been able
to win their favor by offering jobs and other perquisites, or even by
treating them with some of the elaborate consideration they felt their
positions demanded. But he mostly looked upon them with a contempt that
was familiar from the days when he was the fiery "popular leader" and
they were les candidats he despised.

Soon even members of what was supposed to be his own
party were openly attacking him. As the months wore on, and the work of
governing, of overcoming the constant bickering and putting a program
through, became more and more frustrating, President Aristide came to
rely increasingly on direct appeals to the people. To the extent he failed
to build political strength within the institutions of the government,
he turned to the masses that had always been his strength. And the more
he did so, the more fearful became those who relied on the institutions
of established power: the officers and the elite.

Aristide's relations with the military had meantime begun
to sour. By now, he had raised Cédras to the position of army commander,
but he delayed in sending the nomination to the legislature, putting the
officer in a difficult position—did he have authority or not?—and
causing rumbles of discontent from within the officer corps. Already he
had forced back into the army a number of officers who had been cashiered
in recent years; many of them were deeply unpopular with the other officers,
particularly the man Aristide appointed to the key position of head of
the police force, Pierre Cherubin. During the summer, when enlisted men
and sailors had rebelled against their commanding officers at several
bases around the capital, the president had generally supported them,
on occasion intervening personally to remove the officers in question.
This earned him considerable popularity within the lower ranks, a popularity
that the officers deeply feared. Finally, he had begun to create his own
civilian security force, a contingent of well-armed bodyguards that would
be trained by French and Swiss experts and would be loyal only to him.
The prospect of another armed force, even a small one, deeply disturbed
many within the military.

And then, on July 29, the date Franí§ois Duvalier
had designated National Security Volunteers [Tontons Macoutes] Day, Roger
Lafontant and most of his accomplices in the January 7 coup attempt were
brought to trial. For all his claims that he was the "anti-Macoute candidate,"
Aristide had done little to bring to justice those who had been responsible
for the large-scale killings of the post-Duvalier years, contenting himself
with appointing a presidential commission. (When by the summer, it had
done nothing, he appointed a second.) The trial of Roger Lafontant, therefore,
became a symbol of the Aristide government's commitment to justice.

In the event, the trial became something of a farce.
Public threats of "up-rooting" made it impossible for Lafontant and the
other defendants to find attorneys willing to take their cases; the court
finally appointed attorneys only a few days before the trial. The trial
went on for twenty-one straight hours in a circus-like atmosphere of violent
intimidation and riot. Enormous crowds of lavalassiens engulfed
the court house, young men brandishing tires and matches prominent among
them. When the accused rose to testify—the crowds could watch the
proceedings on televisions set up on the courthouse steps—the mobs
began to howl and scream and push toward the courthouse doors, while young
men set several tires alight. Although Lafontant was charged with a crime
that under Haitian law could be punished by a maximum of fifteen years
in prison, the judge, clearly intimidated by the crowd outside—who
themselves were responding to open calls from President Aristide—sentenced
Lafontant and seventeen others to life at hard labor.

A week later, at a rally of students, President Aristide
delivered what became one of his best-known speeches. From the scene,
the Radio Métro-pole reporter told listeners that the president "thinks
that without popular pressure and the Père Lebrun threat"—the
threat of necklacing, that is—"in front of the courthouse, the sentence
to life would not have been chosen in Lafontant's case. The head of state,"
the reporter went on, "explained that the Constitution did not provide
for the necklacing torture but it does not bar this practice." The station
then went on to offer a substantial excerpt from President Aristide's
comments to the students, many of which took the form of question and
answer:

Was there Père Lebrun inside the courthouse?

No! [the crowd shouts back]

Was there Père Lebrun in front of the courthouse?

Yes!

Did the people use Père Lebrun?

No!

Did the people forget it?

No!

Do they have the right to forget it?

No!

Do not say that I said it!

[Laughter.]…

In front of the courthouse, for 24 hours, Père
Lebrun became a good firm bed [a Creole phrase for a cushion or a support].
Inside the courthouse, the Justice Ministry had the law in its hands,
the people had their good firm bed outside. The people had their little
matches in their hands. They had gas nearby. Did they use it?

No!

That means that the people respect…?

The Constitution!

As he had done so many times before, from the pulpit
of St. Jean Bosco and elsewhere, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was using his
strong voice to rally and teach the people. But now he was President of
the Republic and his audience was supposed to include all the Haitians,
many of whom could not be expected to view these particular efforts with
understanding. As he told an interviewer later, he wanted Haiti to have
what it didn't now possess: "a judicial mechanism that produces justice."
How else, he argued, to create one but with the help of the people themselves?
They would serve, he hoped, to counter-balance the structure of corruption
built on money and privilege. The people, he said,

must now become a force of credibility, capable
of exerting legitimate pressure on the judicial system, but without threatening
it, so that when the judge knows that the people are there, united awaiting
justice, the judge can feel strengthened to render justice and not succumb
to the weight of money or the pressures that will come upon him.[21]

President Aristide sought to make of his followers, the
great flood outside the courthouse, a "force of credibility." He sought,
as he always had, to shape them, to raise them up by his words, But to
many Haitians, those words with their implication that deadly violence
could be unleashed, did not seem at all reassuring coming from an elected
President of the Republic, the man who was supposed to have responsibility
to govern his people through the constitution and the established mechanisms
of power. He told the student rally:

When the people heard: life in prison, the people
forgot their little gas and little Père Lebrun. Was Père Lebrun
used on that day?

No!

If it had not gone well, would the people have
used Père Lebrun?

Yes!

Therefore, when through education one learns
to to write Père Lebrun and how to think Père Lebrun, one does
not use it when it is unnecessary….[22]

To his immediate audience, the message may have been
a moderate one. But it was nonetheless the speech of a revolutionary,
a leader who depended on the force of his followers to move and pressure
a structure of power that he could not yet control. As another Métropole
reporter told his listeners from the youth rally, the "head of state feels
only a complete revolution could change things in Haiti." Though he went
on to say that "literacy is a necessary step" toward achieving such a
revolution and pointed out "the important results obtained through literacy
campaigns in…Cuba and Nicaragua," it is unlikely that many of his
listeners around the country heard much beyond the word "revolution,"
for to them that was what their president represented.

By now, relations with the legislature had reached
a crucial point. In August, the legislative leaders summoned Prime Minister
René Préval for a vote on what was, in effect, a measure of no
confidence that, if successful, would have unseated the Préval government.
On the day of the vote, thousands of chanting Aristide supporters surrounded
the Palais Législatif, displaying stacks of tires, waving matches and
cans of gasoline, and screaming threats to burn the legislators. Inside
the chamber, the noise was deafening; and the vote did not take place. As
they tried to escape the building, at least two deputies were surrounded
by lavalassiens and beaten, one of them severely. A mob moved through
the capital, sacking, among other places, the offices of a left-wing trade
union whose leader had called for Aristide's resignation and of a political
mass organization that had been one of his key supporters in the election.

President Aristide would later try to make peace with
the legislature, visiting the Palais with a bouquet of flowers in hand
and persuading them to hold off on the no-confidence measure. But the
example had been set. The congressmen had tried, through obstructionist,
perhaps irresponsible but still quite legal means, to unseat the Péval
government, and they had been prevented by the president's mobs in the
streets. It was, in retrospect, a critical break with the traditional
politicians. It convinced many among the political class and among what
the Aristide refers to as "the bourgeoisie"—who, he writes, had been
given the opportunity by Lavalas "to opt for a democratic transition rather
than for a violent revolution"—that President Aristide, when it came
down to it, had no more respect for the constitution than any other Haitian
ruler.

A critical mass had been attained. On the one hand, Aristide
was showing signs of weakness. The president's support in parliament,
even among the deputies and senators supposedly committed to him, had
reached a low point. He had been under increasing criticism even from
some of the popular groups for his willingness to come to an agreement
with the IMF—which they considered a foremost symbol of evil. The
officers and many of the well-to-do had become increasingly worried by
events like the rioting on August 13, and what they might portend. For
their part, the officers were annoyed by the "temporary" status of Cédras's
appointment; concerned about the civilian security detail, which would
put weapons in the hands of some of his supporters; and threatened by
the president's interventions to defend the troops after their rebellions.
And perhaps their chance might pass: Aristide was speaking at the United
Nations, soon he would visit President Bush in Washington, hundreds of
millions of dollars of aid were on the way. If not now, when?

By mid-September, as the president prepared to leave
for New York to address the United Nations, rumors of a coup were everywhere.

Even as President Aristide
stood before the General Assembly, on September 25, 1991, officers of the
unit known as the Cafeteria—which, under the command of an ambitious
major named Michel Franí§ois, had responsibility for the downtown business
district—were addressing their troops, detailing the operation that
was to unfold that weekend. Aristide's people picked up the rumors and relayed
them to New York. By the time he returned on Friday, the president had grown
angry and defiant. He was hustled from his plane—according to some
soldiers, the original plot entailed seizing the president, or even shooting
him, as he emerged from the cabin—and into his jeep, and he and his
entourage began the drive into the city. It turned out to be a painfully
slow procession, for the people of the bidonvilles had been alerted,
and by now the roadside was packed with tens of thousands of cheering Haitians.
It was a demonstration of strength.

At the Palace, to another vast and wildly demonstrating
crowd, he stepped forward to deliver what has become, sadly, his most
famous single address. It is the speech of an aggrieved man, a leader
who believed that he had behaved reasonably and prudently, and who now
sees that his patience and restraint had gained him nothing: his enemies
were plotting still to overthrow him. He begins his discourse with an
appeal to the well-to-do, imploring them to "cooperate by using the money…to
create work opportunities…so more people can get jobs."

If you do not do so, I feel sorry for you. Really
I do. [laughter from the crowd] It will not be my fault because this money
you have is not really yours. You acquired it through criminal activity.
You made it by plundering, by embezzling…. You made it under oppressive
regimes…, under a corrupt system…. Today, seven months after
7 February, on a day ending in seven, I give one last chance. I ask you
to take this chance, because you will not have two or three more chances,
only one. Otherwise, it will not be good for you. [applause]…

While there exist patriotic bourgeoisie who earned their
money "through honest work," he tells the crowd, unfortunately, "they
are few…not the majority." He goes on to implore the deputies and
senators to "work together with the people," because, Aristide says, "we
prefer to fail with the masses than succeed without them." Then, after
a plea to state employees to remember that "diverting state money is stealing,
and thieves do not deserve to stay in public administration," he proceeds
to deliver what will become the most notorious words of his public career:

If I catch a thief, a robber, a swindler, or
an embezzler, if I catch a fake lavalas…. If you catch someone
who does not deserve to be where he is, do not fail to give him what he
deserves. [crowd cheers] Do not fail to give him what he deserves! Do
not fail to give him what he deserves!

Your tool is in your hands. Your instrument
is in your hands. Your Constitution is in your hand. Do not fail to give
him what he deserves. [loud cheers from the crowd]. That device is in
your hands. Your trowel is in your hands….

Article 291 of the Constitution, which is symbolized
by the center of my head where there is no more hair, provides that the
Macoutes are excluded from the political game. Macoutes are excluded from
the political game. Macoutes are excluded from the political game. Do
not fail to give them what they deserve. You spent three sleepless nights
in front of the National Penitentiary. If one escapes, do not fail to
give him what he deserves [loud cheers crowd].[23]

You are watching all Macoute activities throughout
the country. We are watching and praying. If we catch one, do not fail
to give him what he deserves. What a nice tool! What a nice instrument!
[loud cheers from crowd] What a nice device! [crowd cheers] It is a pretty
one. It is elegant, attractive, splendorous, graceful, and dazzling. It
smells good. Wherever you go, you feel like smelling it. [crowd cheers]
It is provided for by the Constitution, which bans Macoutes from the political
scene.[24]

These words would later form the heart of a campaign
of defamation against Aristide—a campaign expertly designed and promoted
by the Haitian military (and still pursued by Senator Helms and his allies
in the CIA and in Congress). But when taken in context, the extreme rhetoric
of this speech is not very mysterious: it was a call to arms, an effort
to rally his followers and to intimidate his enemies—who even as
he spoke, as he well knew, were plotting to overthrow him.[25]
It was an effort, that is, to hold power by brandishing what had always
been his greatest strength and his most feared weapon—the Flood,
the avalanche represented by the poor multitudes who were now cheering
before him.

Which is to say that the speech was an act of politics,
an effort to prevent, by threatening the violent use of the power he had,
what has almost always been the consequence of political failure in Haiti:
a coup d'état. That is why placing the speech at the center of a
campaign against Aristide as a "violator of human rights" has always seemed
a bit strange; if it comes to that, there is little doubt that no more
Haitians died of abuses under Aristide than under the regime that preceded
him, and certainly far fewer than under the one that supplanted him.[26]

But in the end human rights did not bring Aristide down,
politics did. For if many of the charges made against him are demonstrably,
factually wrong, they are not absurd; they are a quite vivid projection
of the fears of those who had always held power in Haiti—a projection
of what they were certain was coming. These expectations were by no means
based solely on their distrust of Aristide, or on their misreading of
his character. At least in part, they represented their recognition that,
if the president were to achieve what he so fervently wanted to achieve—a
"social revolution," a "redistribution of wealth, freely discussed"—if
he truly was intent on achieving these things, then they would feel bound
to resist him, and violence would be inevitable.

By this measure, as
it happened, the speech proved to be a failure. Aristide had launched an
angry challenge to those who opposed him, and given a clear sign that he
knew what the rules would be—rules allowing the use of naked power
which he doubtless did not favor, but which he had clearly shown, on several
occasions, he was prepared to accept. When the time came, and his antagonists
played by those rules—with a much greater ruthlessness than he may
have contemplated—he and his forces found themselves utterly unprepared,
and they were routed.

When the rumors of a coup persisted, and the signs of
trouble at various military bases became undeniable, Aristide telephoned
General Cédras, who "supported me in my skepticism, and we laughed
about it together." He trusted Cédras, had "chosen to cultivate a
good deal of confidence in our relationship." Had the general not, after
all, "often remarked on his attachment to the democratic process"?

Throughout its various incarnations during the past few
decades, the Haitian army has shown one consistent trait: an overriding
fear of division, a reluctance to set one soldier against another. An
aggressive officer, if he has the right command, can often succeed in
staging a coup that many officers don't strongly support because they
will refuse to act against him. Even now, General Cédras's role in
the coup is unclear. It is unlikely that it was as innocent as the Bush
administration and the US embassy in Port-au-Prince would later claim;
but it was always doubtful that even an "attachment to the democratic
process," however strong it was or wasn't, would lead Cedras to move against
his fellow officers, if they were determined to act.

Late Sunday night, shooting erupted throughout the capital.
Soldiers fired on President Aristide's house, where he had gone the day
before.

The night was shattered by cries and by the
incessant noise of automatic weapons. It was impossible for me to leave
my house, which had been transformed into a bunker. It was equally impossible
for me to send out an appeal that would be heard.

The officers had taken the obvious step: by shutting
down the radio stations, they had cut off Aristide's most potent weapon—his
voice. Now squads of soldiers made their way into the bidonvilles,
shooting anyone they saw, firing into the scrapwood hovels. When the people
came out into the garishly lit streets, the soldiers shot them down. It
was a simple tactic, with a long and honored history in Haitian politics.
(The army last used it to devastating effect in 1957, before Duvalier
was elected, to decimate the ranks of the populist who had been his most
important rival.) The people, confused, frightened, and disorganized—they
had received no mot d'ordre from their leader—stumbled into
the streets and died. Automatic weapons, ruthlessly employed, had given
the lie to Aristide's "unarmed revolution."

Around Aristide's house, meanwhile, a great crowd had
gathered. Dancing, singing, raising their machetes and their pikes high
as the sun rose, they defied what they knew was coming. With automatic
weapons clattering in the distance, they sang the songs they had made
to honor him:

Titid! Titid!The country is made for you!Sit where you like, there you areowner!

Many wanted to walk with the president to the Palace,
to enfold him in their numbers and protect him as he retook the seat of
power. Perhaps it might have worked: by now the diplomats were trying
to intervene, urging Cédras—who denied he was in control of
the "rebel" troops—to "protect the constitutional order." Perhaps
in broad daylight the soldiers would not have had the nerve to massacre
thousands of people in the street.

But Aristide would have none of it. He accepted the French
ambassador's dramatic offer to escort him to the Palace. Twice, as they
made their way through the deserted, corpse-strewn streets, soldiers ambushed
their entourage, forcing the president and his personal security officers
to stop and return fire. Finally, he reached the Palace and the company
of the presidential guards, whom the president was convinced would protect
him. They were, after all, the ti soldats, the little soldiers
who, as he often said, might as well have formed part of Lavalas
itself. But as he entered the Palace, the ti soldats began to stream
out of it, toward the military head-quarters across the square. Finally,
apart from a handful of loyal aides, Aristide was left alone in the great
white building. Soon, the troops—among them, presidential guards
who had fled moments before—came to take him. They handcuffed him,
hustled him to the headquarters building where he was greeted by a smiling
General Cédras, the protector of the elections that brought Aristide
to power:

Cédras is pleased with himself. The officers
drink to his health. There is the atmosphere of a macabre festival alongside
the bloodied faces of my friends. I myself have my hands tied. They try
to humiliate me. The military discuss my fate in loud tones. "We ought
to kill him." They almost get into an argument about who will have the
pleasure of doing it.

Fortunately for Aristide, as it happened, "international
reaction is worrying the more 'political' among them." The American ambassador,
the French and Venezuelan, were all intervening to save the president's
life.

And so, late that night, Jean-Bertrand Aristide sat in
a deserted airport waiting amid a crowd of abusive, drunken soldiers for
the Venezuelan plane that would carry him to exile.

9.

Two years have passed since Aristide sat waiting in that
airport in Port-au-Prince and he has spent them working tirelessly to
engineer his return. From bases first in Caracas, now in Washington, he
has traveled the world, attending conferences and meetings, delivering
eloquent addresses to the United Nations and the OAS, meeting with presidents
and prime ministers. At the heart of his complex diplomatic struggle lies
a single fact. Four days after Aristide's ouster, President Bush offered
a clue to it when he remarked that, while he was "committed to the restoration
of democracy," he was "reluctant to use US forces to try to accomplish
it."

There's a lesson out there for all presidents,
and the lesson I've learned is that you've got to be very, very careful
of using United States forces in this hemisphere.[27]

Standing beside the President, Father Aristide listened
to the words that, as it turned out, have largely determined his exile.
For if his restoration might not have required the return of American
troops to Port-au-Prince, it would at least have required a willingness
to risk such a return—a willingness to deliver a believable threat
that might have changed the Haitian officers' minds. And that, from the
beginning, the United States has shown itself unwilling to do.

Haiti, as an American diplomat told me shortly after
the coup, is "the original tar baby. No one wants to be forced to go in."
Had Ambassador Adams been able credibly to threaten the use of force,
even as President Aristide was barricaded inside his house, the coup might
never have succeeded, and Aristide might still be in Haiti. But, as one
US government official put it, "Adams just didn't have enough arrows in
his quiver." The Bush administration officials didn't want to threaten
to send in the marines unless they were really willing to do so, and they
didn't have to look too deeply within their souls to realize that—for
Haiti, for Father Aristide—they simply were not willing.[28]

Their successors in the Clinton administration are not
willing, either, which is why we have the Governors Island Accord and
the fiasco that has followed from it. Among other things, the agreement
makes no provision for enforcement, other than the re-imposition of sanctions.
Now that sanctions have been re-imposed and a near-blockade has
been imposed, administration and United Nations officials keep saying
that sanctions "brought Cédras to the table last time"—without
seeming to notice that last time, General Cédras and his officers
came to Governors Island and essentially took Clinton administration and
United Nations officials to the cleaners. They negotiated an accord that
made no provision for justice: those responsible for the coup will simply
retire (in the case of General Cédras) or be transferred to other
posts. The Haitian army would not have to endure a "housecleaning"—such
a provision, after all, might have required the United States to contribute
something more than a contingent of unarmed, or lightly armed, "combat
engineers and technical advisers." In one way or another, under the current
accord, Aristide would be expected to work with many of the same officers
that had over-thrown him and murdered his followers. That is why President
Aristide was reluctant to sign, and why he had torpedoed a similar agreement
negotiated in Washington in February 1992, intensely annoying the Bush
administration.

In the end, he had no choice. He signed, and then watched
while the killings in Port-au-Prince inexorably increased as the date
of his supposed return grew closer. He listened as officials from the
United Nations and the US Embassy went on making their optimistic noises,
even as his friends and followers were being murdered. And he watched
as the American troopship sailed into Haitian waters—and then, faced
with a handful of civilians with guns and loud voices, turned tail and
sailed out again.

So Father Aristide waits in Washington. At the end of
October, he went before the United Nations and demanded that the foreign
countries apply a "total embargo" against Haiti—a tactic last applied
to Haiti, unsuccessfully, by the French at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. So far, the Americans, among others, have been unwilling to go
along.

In Haiti, meantime, the people suffer; CARE, which feeds
six hundred thousand Haitians every day—one in ten—has announced
it may halt its food deliveries to the countryside because of lack of
fuel. If this happens, many people will starve.

February 7 will mark the end of the third year of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's five-year term. He has spent thirty-one weeks
in the Palace. In Haiti, his followers wait faithfully for him. But his
enemies have proved to be tenacious, and it is hard to believe that they
will ever allow him to rule Haiti again.

—November 4, 1993

This is the third part of a three-part article.

Notes

[1]
See my "Haiti on the Verge" and "The Prophet," parts one and two of the
present review, The New York Review, November 4 and 18, 1993.

[5]
For Cheney, see "This Week With David Brinkley," ABC News, October 24,
1993, and Charlie Rose, PBS, October 28, 1993. For Scowcroft, see
Jessica Lee and Maria Puente, "Haiti's Aristide a man with multiple faces,"
USA Today, October 22, 1993, p. 6A; and "The World Today," CNN,
October 22, 1993.

[6]
In the way of Washington, the rain of leaks from Aristide's critics in
time produced an answering drizzle from his allies, beginning October
31, when The New York Times, citing unnamed "government officials,"
reported that "a document used to brand President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
of Haiti as mentally unstable was probably a forgery." This document,
which had previously been circulated in a Congressional hearing, and which
"purports to describe Mr. Aristide's medical history," had in fact been
"based on uncorroborated information supplied by his political enemies
in Haiti."

The following day, in a front page story,
the Times reported that "key members of the military leadership
controlling Haiti and blocking the return of its elected President…were
paid by the Central Intelligence Agency for information from the mid-1980s
at least until the 1991 coup that forced Mr. Aristide from power, according
to American officials." In a 1992 report, Latell of the CIA, according
to the Times, had also praised General Cédras, the de facto
military ruler, as one of "the most promising group of Haitian leaders
to emerge" since the fall of Duvalier.

See "US Rejects Document on Aristide's Health,"
New York Times, October 31, 1993, p. 12, and Tim Weiner, "Key Haiti
Leaders Said To Have Been In The CIA's Pay," New York Times, November
1, 1993, p. A1.

[7]
See Steven A. Holmes, "Administration Is Fighting Itself On Haiti Policy,"
The New York Times, October 23, 1993, p. A1, and Steven Greenhouse,
"Clinton Defends Aristide," The New York Times, October 24, 1993,
p. 7.

[11]
"April Fool" is a pun on General Avril's name, which is French for April.

[12]
He was never, however, "defrocked," notwithstanding the accounts of various
commentators in the American press, including, for example, Robert Novak
in The Washington Post. Aristide remained a priest, though he could
conduct mass only with the co-operation of a bishop.

[14]
In his airport arrival remarks in Port-au-Prince in November, Adams had
quoted a Creole proverb—Bourik chaje pa kanpe: "A loaded donkey
can't stand still"—which was universally taken to be a criticism
of Avril's refusal to let Haiti, "loaded" and ready for democracy, move
to elections. The remark earned Adams a good deal of popularity among
Haitians—unheard of for a foreign diplomat, let alone an American
one—most of whom hence-forth knew him only by his nickname, Loaded
Donkey.

[15]
See Leslie F. Manigat, Haiti of the Sixties: Object of International
Concern (The Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research, 1964),
pp. 23"“24.

[16]
Sylvio Claude, a popular presidential candidate who later died at the
hands of lavalassiens during the coup against Aristide, told me
that during Jean-Claude's rule, while his men were beating and torturing
Claude, Lafontant liked to drop by to pass the time. "He would watch,
and he would make jokes and laugh," Claude said. "It was like the Romans—you
know, laughing as the lions devoured the Christians."

[17]
Radio Métropole, broadcast January 8, 1991, as recorded and translated
by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

[18]
Haiti Radio-Inter, January 9, 1993, as recorded and translated by Foreign
Broadcast Information Service.

[19]
See, among many examples, "A General Chooses Democracy in Haiti," an editorial
in The New York Times, January 9, 1991.

[20]
Though Aristide certainly did not order it, and though Lafontant provoked
it, it was certainly lavalassiens who committed most of the pillaging
and killing in their leader's defense. Which is why it makes little sense
for America's Watch and other human rights organizations to attribute,
in what is otherwise a thorough and judicious report, the deaths that
occurred to Ertha Pascal-Trouillot and her administration:

The number of incidents of summary justice
by crowds under Aristide was roughly equal to the number under the first
seven months of the government of…Trouillot, and considerably less
than the surge of bloodletting that followed the coup attempt of January
1991, during the last month of the Trouillot government [my emphasis].

True, Aristide was not yet in office, but
if the killings are to be deposited in the "account" of anyone, it certainly
shouldn't be in Trouillot's; as a political fact, they must belong to
Aristide. Whether, or to what extent, they were justified, of course,
is quite another question. See "The Aristide Government's Human Rights
Record," A Report by Americas Watch, The National Coalition For Haitian
Refugees and Caribbean Rights, Vol 3, Issue 12 (November 1, 1991),
p. 6.

[22]
Radio Métropole, August 5, 1991, as recorded and translated by the
Foreign Broadcast Information Service. I have made a few slight changes
in the translation.

[23]
Crowds had gathered before the penitentiary in response to rumors that
Roger Lafontant was about to escape.

During the coup two days later, a soldier
came to Lafontant's cell and shot him. The soldier has since said he acted
under orders from the prison commander, who in turn alleges that Aristide
personally telephoned him on the night of the coup and ordered him to
execute Lafontant. Aristide vehemently denies the charge, which is based
on testimony elicited by the military government.

[24]
Radio Nationale, September 27, 1991, as recorded and translated by Foreign
Broadcast Information Service.

[25]
Unfortunately, President Aristide himself has considerably muddied the
waters by insisting for more than two years that he was referring not
to Père Lebrun but to the Constitution—an assertion that a full
reading of the speech and a viewing of the videotape shows to be quite
insupportable. Only recently has he begun to respond, when asked about
the speech, that readers should "put the text in its context. The coup
had started. I was using words to answer bullets." See Joel Attinger and
Michael Kramer's interview, "It's Not If I Go Back, but When," Time,
November 1, 1993, p. 28.

[28]
The masterful propaganda offensive that the Haitian military launched
during the weeks after the coup, together with the vehement anti-Aristide
sentiment expressed by many politicians, including many deputies and senators,
didn't make the administration any more willing. And though to my knowledge
there has never been any convincing evidence brought forward to support
the conviction—widespread among Haitians, and particularly among
Aristide's supporters among the intellectual class—that the United
States secretly supported the coup, certainly officials in various parts
of the US government actively mistrusted and disliked him. The Los
Angeles Times, for example, quotes a source who was "working in a
senior position for the Senate Intelligence Committee" to the effect that
"there were those in the CIA who were not pleased with [Aristide] in the
past and don't want him to be more successful now." This particular source
traces the Agency's antipathy to the threat the CIA believes is posed
by liberation theology: "Liberation theology proponents are not too popular
at the agency," he says. "Maybe second only to the Vatican for not liking
liberation theology are the people at Langley." See Jim Mann, "CIA's Aid
Plan Would Have Undercut Aristide in '87-'88," The Los Angeles Times,
October 31, 1993, p. 1.